Supermicro SuperServer 6013P-TB

Armari took a notable first in Enterprise with its RM-060-1MS rack server, as this was our initial look at AMD's Opteron processor. Keen to keep up the pressure, this time the company uses dual 3.06GHz Xeon chips in Supermicro's new rack-server motherboard, the X5DPR-TG2+, which is equipped with SATA (Serial ATA). Wrapped in Supermicro's latest SC813 chassis, it delivers a hot-swap SATA backplane and room for up to four removable drives. The review system was supplied with a quartet of 250GB Western Digital WD2500JD Caviars, putting the total unformatted capacity at the magical 1TB level.

Internally, the design is unbeatable, with easy access to all components for swift upgrades and maintenance. We immediately noticed the short SATA cables connecting the drive backplane to the four interfaces on the motherboard, as they take up so little room and look far more elegant than bulky SCSI or IDE cables. RAID comes courtesy of the ICP Vortex zero-channel controller card, which takes over the SATA channels to provide the full range of RAID options. Arrays are managed using the RAID Navigator utility. A separate RAIDMail utility is used to link failures to alerts and can send a broadcast to another system and a message to one mail address.

The motherboard uses an Intel E7501 chipset, which doesn't offer any huge improvements over the E7500 other than a slightly faster 533MHz FSB, a higher system bus bandwidth of 4.3GB/sec and support for 266MHz DDR SDRAM memory. The board itself retains the simple design of its predecessors, ensuring airflow is routed where it's needed most. The processors are fitted with chunky heatsinks and the cooling fins allow air to pass through them, over the memory behind and out the rear grille. Two large blower fans shunt high volumes of air through the chassis and noise levels have been noticeably reduced over earlier Supermicro rack servers. There's also more room for hardware expansion, as a riser card provides one full-length 64-bit, 133MHz slot along with the 64-bit, 66MHz low-profile slot that looks after the RAID card. Network options are good - you get a pair of Intel Gigabit adaptor chipsets, which support fault-tolerant teams or load-balanced links.

This is the first Supermicro system not to include the LANDesk Client Manager software. Instead, you get a new and improved version of the manufacturer's own SuperO Doctor utility. Its interface delivers an impressive amount of information. You can view a comprehensive table of components, monitor critical system operations and remotely reboot or power down selected servers. Multiple users with different access privileges may be created, alerts tied in with messages to pagers and email addresses, and it can generate reports in CSV format.

This system proves Supermicro rack-server products just keep on getting better. Internal design is exemplary, it delivers plenty of the latest SATA RAID protected storage and the new management tools are better than ever.

Author: Dave Mitchell